CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Examining How Composition Teachers Use Online Social Media to Support Scholarly Composing Tasks

This dissertation research study investigates how scholars use social media to support scholarly composing tasks. The study's goal is to identify social media tactics that may be productively used for scholarly composing and can be introduced in undergraduate composition courses.

We seek participants who meet the following criteria:

Faculty, graduate students, or academic staff who have taught composition in collegiate settings

Individuals who self-describe as using social media (such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and so forth) to support their scholarly composing.

Individuals who routinely undertake scholarly composing tasks, which we interpret broadly to include any paper, multimodal, or digital composing tasks undertaken in service of your scholarly work.

Study participation entails the following:

Completion of a short online survey about your social media use and scholarly composing work,

If your survey responses indicate interest in continued participation, you may be invited to participate in an on optional series of three interviews, approximately one hour each, over the course of 2 to 3 months. During these interviews, we’ll ask you to elaborate on your use of social media in service of scholarly composing, ask you to draw three free-form diagrams related to your use of social media and typical scholarly composing processes, and to consider how social-media behaviors identified in this research might apply to teaching composition.

Filling out the online survey will take approximately 10 to 15 minutes. Participating in the later, optional one-on-one interviews will take approximately 3 hours over the course of 3 interviews. Survey and interview participants will not be required to travel or incur expenses as a result of this study. Survey participants need not reveal their identity, and those who choose to reveal their identity will be referred to by pseudonym in the published data. Interview participants can choose to be identified by their real name or pseudonym in the published data.

Benefits of participation in this study:

There is no formal compensation for participating in this study, but it provides an opportunity to reflect on your use of social media as a scholar, to contribute to research that seeks to improve composition pedagogy, add to scholarly knowledge about how social media can support scholarly work, and earn the undying gratitude of a graduate student.

This dissertation research is approved by the Institutional Review Board at The Ohio State University. This approval includes circulation of this Call for Participation via online channels, including linking to this call via email and through social media tools.If you know other composition scholars who may wish to participate in this research, please feel free to share this link: < http://www.jenmichaels.net/cfp.html >.